The Trauma of Breathing: Notes from Lacan’s Seminars

It is clear that breath has become an important topic for psychoanalysts. For example, Jamieson Webster recently wrote an entertaining piece on breathing and psychoanalysis for the New York Review (https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2021/04/02/on-breathing/). I do not intend to write anything for entertainment or educational purposes. I am merely sharing some scribbles about ‘breath’ I made while skimming Lacan’s seminars this evening. Why produce these scribbles? At the time of writing, oxygen and breath is more important than ever: within the Indian healthcare system, today, oxygen has become a scarce resource, as those suffering from COVID-19 are literally suffocating to death.

In his sixth seminar, Lacan claimed that that breath — unlike speech — has no ‘element of cutting.’ We should keep in mind that this is only a few years after he described the ‘real’ as that which resists symbolization, absolutely. In this first definition of breath there is no symbolic cut possible, since breath absolutely resists any such move. Note, I am using breath not as an element of breathing but rather as a synonym for respiration as such. Lacan says the following:

There is in respiration no part of this element of cutting. Respiration is not cut off, or if it is cut off it is in a fashion which does not fail to generate some drama. There is no element of cutting inscribed in respiration except only in an exceptional fashion. Respiration is rhythmical, respiration is pulsation, […] it is not something which allows there to be symbolized on the imaginary plane precisely what is in question, namely the interval, the cut.

I note the word “pulsation,” which, presumably, is not an accidental word choice for Lacan. There is some connection here of breath with the drive — the pulsation — of the organism, and hence there is some connection of breath with jouissance. Moreover, since breath is without symbolization there is something enigmatic about it, something not only excremental — since we push it out breaths as rejections — but excessive since we take more in than we retain. That it potentially generates drama implies something I would relate to the excessive breath, or to respiration as such — which is also not at all enough — during the panic attack, which means, in other words, there is something of a real traumatic potential involved at the level of breath.

Breath is extremely important during moments of panic, during anxiety ‘attacks.’ It is something of a body event.

Yet, Lacan goes on in the same seminar to claim that, paradoxically, through the respiratory orifice — not system, but orifice — there is the potential for the voice, and the voice, precisely, can be cut and punctuated, and symbolized. Voice is the medium of speech, the locus of a possible symbolization.

But it is the next part that will eventually be picked up again by Lacan in his tenth seminar on anxiety:

In so far as this emission precisely is not punctuated, in so far as it is simply pneuma, flatus, it is obviously very remarkable — and here I would ask you to refer to Jones’ studies — to see that from the point of view of the unconscious it is not individualized at the most radical point as being something which belongs to the order of respiration, but precisely just because of this imposition of the form of cutting referred to the most profound level of experience that we have of it in the unconscious — and it is the merit of Jones to have seen it — to the anal flatus which is found paradoxically, and through this sort of unpleasant surprise that the analytic discoveries have brought us, is found symbolized in the depths of what is in question each time that at the level of the unconscious the phallus is found to symbolize the subject.

There are a number of things worth pointing out here. First, the ‘pneuma flatus’ is a soul fart, breath is something of a farting of the soul. This idea is taken from Jones, and his linkage of breath with anality, which Lacan will criticize years later.

Second, Lacan, because he does not yet have a notion of a ‘real unconscious,’ cannot see breath as a part of the unconscious system. Yet, if we adopt a notion of drives, for our own benefit, then we can say that so long as there is a breathing-subject there is the primordial constitution of a speaking-subject. Of course, without breath there is no speech. Breath is the conduit of speech. The speaking-subject is related to the push or the drive of the breathing-subject just as the symbolic unconscious is built upon the trauma of the real unconscious … if I could put it like that.

Third, the unconscious nonetheless punctuates and cuts breath with speech.

Lacan returns to this theme in seminar nine by reminding us that breath is required for speech. Duh.

He describes the effects of breathing upon an animal’s cheeks as indications of the animal’s readiness for speech. He claims that this is a good topic of study for phonetics: “The effects of breathing on the animal’s cheeks evoke no less sensibly a whole set of mechanisms of a properly phonatory type which, for example would be completely suitable for the celebrated experiments of Abbe Rousselot, the founder of phonetics.” At this point, he notes that breath fills in cavities and produces phonatory vibrations that give rise to vibrating instruments … drums and horns … “which allow there to be controlled at what levels and at what moments there come to be superimposed the diverse elements which constitute the emission of a syllable, and more precisely everything that we call a phoneme, because these phonetic experiments are the natural antecedents of what was afterwards defined as phonematics.”

And then Lacan says something striking:

My dog has speech, and it is incontestable, indisputable, not only from the fact that the modulations which result from these properly articulated decomposable efforts inscribable in loco, but also from the correlations between the moments at which these phonemes are produced, namely when she is in a room where experience has taught the animal that the human group gathered around a table should be there for a good while, that some spin- off from what is happening at that moment, namely the festivities, should accrue to her: it must not be believed that all of this is centred on need. There is no doubt a certain relationship with this element of consumption, but the communing element of the fact that she is eating with the others is present in it.

At this point Lacan goes on to discuss what differentiates the speaking-being as human from the animal, and it concerns the relationship to the other as well as the distinctively human relationship to identification:

What is it that distinguishes this usage, which is in short very sufficiently successful as regards the results that it is a question of obtaining for my dog, of speech, from human speech? I am not in the process of giving you words which claim to cover all the results of the question, I am only giving responses which are orientated towards what should be for all of us what it is a question of mapping out, namely: the relationship to identification. What distinguishes this speaking animal from what happens because of the fact that man speaks is the following, which is quite striking as regards my dog, a dog who could well be yours, a dog who has nothing extraordinary about her, is that, contrary to what happens in the case of man in so far as he speaks, she never takes me for another

It is at this point that we can see the way breath and speech lead one to the imaginary identifications that characterize the obsessional neurotic in Lacan’s period when he flirting so much with Alexandre Kojeve’s Hegelian master/slave philosophy.

Finally, in the tenth seminar on anxiety, Lacan relates breath to the objet petit a. He develops his thoughts more on Jones’ work on anality and obsessionals, whereby breath and anality are linked together. Breath is here regarded as excrement:

In the article on the Madonna, Jones tackles the subject right away by telling us that the fertilizing breath is a very lovely thing, that we find its trace across myth, legend and poetry, that nothing could be more beautiful than the awakening of Being with the Ruach [soul from the Kabbalah], the passing breath of the Eternal, but that he, Jones, knows a bit more about it.

But then Lacan makes a funny remark: “He’s going to tell us what sort of wind is involved here. It’s anal wind.” He is claiming that Jones reduces breath or wind to anality. Lacan continues:

As Jones tells us, experience proves the interest — this interest is presumed to be a lively interest, a biological interest — that the subject, such as he discovers himself in analysis, shows in his excrement, in the shit he produces, and that this interest is infinitely more present, more evident, more dominant, than any preoccupation the subject would have every reason to have with his breathing, which seems, going by what Jones says, not to interest him. And why not? Because breathing is automatic.

Here I stop for a moment.

Lacan is claiming that Jones passes by something about breathing to arrive finally at anality, and seems to miss something essential about breath. What he misses about breath is the fact that it is automatic — and this is also why he neglects breath, because unlike breath, anality is more psychoanalytic, apparently. But this word “automatic” seems important because the automatic nature of the real is most likely at stake in this definition; it is a real of breath that is tied to biology, though not traditional biology, but tied to the real body.

Lacan’s argument is that this description of breath as automatic, implied in Jones’ work, is a bad reason to neglect it and to turn automatically to anality. First, because psychoanalysis knows very well the importance of “suffocation and respiratory difficulties in the original establishing of the function of anxiety.” Hence, here we have a linkage of objet petit a with anxiety, with the automatism of the real, and hence, finally, with the real body. Lacan continues: “Saying that the living subject, even the human subject, is not aware of the importance of this function is a surprising opening argument […] [and it also ignores the fact of] the relation between the respiratory function and the productive moment in sexual intercourse.”

Lacan puts it now in no uncertain terms:

Breathing, in the form of the mother or the father’s panting, was very much part of the first phenomenology of the traumatic scene, to the point of entering quite legitimately the sphere of what could emerge from it for the child as a sexual theory.

Now, we have added to our theory of the real of breath a notion of trauma. What is the primal scene? The primal scene is precisely trauma.

A primordial trauma.

Lacan notices — as I am tempted to do after spending time in India studying the Upanishads for myself — the importance of breath. Most of the Dharmic religions, in fact, place breath at the centre of spiritual exploration. Lacan says: “He notes, for example, the function of down-breathing in the Upanishads where it will be specified, using the term Apana, that Brahma created mankind with the downward breathings of his back part.” Lacan is not convinced by this claim that it was anal wind.

Lacan claims that excrement is there from the start, before the mouth and the anus are differentiated: “we can already see it functioning at the level of the blastopore.” This is a very interesting claim since the blastopore, in biology, is often described as a ‘mouth like opening’ which ‘in many animals […] becomes the anus.” (https://tinyurl.com/breathlacan.). Lacan points out later the the Hebrew of “vanity,” which we read in the English translation of Ecclesiastes — “All is vanity” — is actually closer to “mere breath.” (more on this: https://www.shmoop.com/ecclesiastes/vanity-allegory.html)

Lacan says:

To this is linked the supreme and magisterial tone that resounds and goes on resounding at the heart of sacred Scripture, in spite of its blasphemous aspect, the heh-bel or hab-ale, the all is vanity from the text called Ecclesiastes. What we translate as vanity is this in the Hebrew text, whose three radical letters I’ve written up here […] and which means wind, or even breath, if you like, vapour, a thing that fades away — which brings us back to an ambiguity that I think it’s more legitimate to mention here, in connection with what can be most abject about breath, than all of what Jones thought he had to elaborate with respect to the Madonna’s conception through the ear. This thematic of vanity is precisely the one that furnishes its abiding resonance and scope to the Hegelian definition of the original fruitful struggle from which the Phenomenology of Spirit starts off, the struggle to death called the struggle for pure prestige, which really does carry the overtone of meaning the struggle for nothing.

We can see how many of the elements from previous seminars are here linked together and development and not merely rethought. For example, the breath, as trauma, as objet petit a, and as linked to the drives and the body, are also related to the struggle for nothing which defines the speaking-being (against, say, other animals). Lacan concludes — from what I can tell — with the following:

Now the objet petit a at issue, marked out as the cause of desire, is neither this vanity [breath] nor this piece of waste. Although in its function it really is what I’ve been spelling out, namely, the object defined as a remainder that is irreducible to the symbolization that occurs at the locus of the Other, it nevertheless depends on this Other because how else would it be constituted?

Breath is not an object cause of desire.